Place of remembrance, 2023

In commemoration of the victims of forced labour at I.G. Farben, ART+COM has created a place of remembrance for Bayer AG. Pointing in the directions of the former factory sites, the five-metre-tall sculpture is an artistic translation of personal notes, corporate records and historical data from the Bayer company archive that documents the fates of the around 16,000 forced labourers.

Not as a static memorial, but as an organic sculpture, it repeatedly calls for an examination of the company’s history during the Nazi period. While the polished stainless-steel surfaces will remain unchanged, the use of untreated woods and seeds, sown in and around the sculpture, will lead to the sculpture transforming over time.

The installation is accompanied by a web-app which decodes the meaning of the archive data and documents the transformation process of the sculpture, recorded by a time-lapse camera. Due to unpredictable changes of decomposition and plant growth, the sculpture will remember the victims in ever new ways.

In cooperation with studio milz.